Our Mission & Focus
The Monitor Team works to ensure that the NYPD engages in constitutional stops, frisks, and searches.
The Monitor Team’s focus is on the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices, as well as its trespass enforcement. The Monitor Team regularly assesses the NYPD’s compliance and publicly files reports with the court detailing their findings.
Know Your Rights
When you are stopped, frisked, and/or searched by a New York City police officer, you have certain rights.
Who We Are
Latest Report
On October 6, 2026, the Monitor published its Corrected Thirty-Third Report on the NYPD’s underreporting of Terry stops. More than a decade after the Court’s 2013 order, underreporting of Terry stops remains a persistent and significant problem. Although the NYPD’s underreporting compliance rate is trending in a positive direction, the NYPD has acknowledged that underreporting is a problem and is working on a plan to address it.
- The Monitor’s audit sample of body-worn camera (BWC) videos included a fixed number of videos from each category (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, unlabeled, and Crimes in Progress), rather than a number proportional to how often each category occurs among all NYPD BWC videos. Because of that, the initial audit results describe underreporting only within the sample itself, and not underreporting across stops citywide.
- In this report, the Monitor team added a second step of reweighting the audit results, so that they reflect the overall citywide mixture of stops. This reweighting estimates how many Terry stops were mislabeled as Level 1 and Level 2 encounters and should have been recorded as Level 3 stops.
- The Monitor’s 2025 unweighted BWC audits found that NYPD officers completed a stop report for 74% of the stops identified in the audit sample, while 26% went unreported.
- After reweighting the audit results to reflect the actual citywide number of stops labeled Level 3, as well as encounters incorrectly labeled Level 1 and Level 2 and those with no level assigned, the Monitor estimates that over 5,500 Terry stops were not properly reported in 2025, an underreporting rate of 18% and a compliance rate of 82%.
- On a reweighted basis, Terry stop reporting compliance has ranged from a low of 60% in 2022 to a high of 82% in 2024 and 2025.
